Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Some of the most interesting takeaways from this year's Advertising Week in New York came from a four-hour session presented by Yahoo Inc. and MediaVest introducing us to our Web 2.0-empowered selves as passionistas. The Sept. 26 session entitled "Passionistas: The New Empowered Consumers" was hosted by craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and further propogated by a BusinessWire press release on the new Yahoo/MediaVest study providing in-depth statistics on us in the course of proclaiming us as proverbial apples in marketers' eyes. Why? Because we are passionate about our interests... and we devote significant amounts of time (much more than most others) to exploring our interests and applying our talents to make impacts and foster change. Interestingly, while the press release got a lot of industry pickup, ClickZ's Enid Burns points out that the Yahoo/MediaVest study's findings are largely in line with those from CNET's study on 'Influencers' from earlier this year.

Regarding these rising powers which we Passionista-Influencers are beginning to wield with increasing proficiency, I hereby officially invite every self-respecting one of us to devise brilliant intellectual means to drive scientifically valid, important initiatives through the political quagmires currently paralyzing them. For example, as William Patrick writes in his Editor's Letter in the September issue of The Journal of Life Sciences, "In the United States, polling data tells us that only a small hard core continues to object to embryonic stem cell research. Unfortunately, U.S. science is held hostage to their views." With our powers and abilities to influence proclaimed so boldly by so many, this is just one of many important fights where I'm hoping we can apply ourselves to make an enlightened difference....